


The Adventure of the Sanguine Client

by sprocket



Category: Elementary (TV), Fringe
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-04
Updated: 2015-09-04
Packaged: 2018-04-17 07:49:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4658484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprocket/pseuds/sprocket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Olivia might be able to order Watson out, but if Peter's assessment of Holmes held true, she would have more luck clocking him over the head and dragging him to an elevator than using her words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Adventure of the Sanguine Client

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sandyk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandyk/gifts).



> Set after "Brave New World" in the Fringe timeline, and early in S2 in Elementary's universe. Thanks to [ for beta.](http://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberryhunter/pseuds/raspberryhunter)

Olivia let herself in the apartment with her lockpicks, not without a smidge of guilt, but with more concern for the lives that might be on the line, including Joaquin Jimenez’s. After two mysterious and gruesome deaths had been linked to two equally mysterious radiation bursts in New York City, Fringe Division had gotten involved, using Massive Dynamic’s resources to uncover two more sources of anomalous delta radiation, a signature effect of William Bell’s dimensional travel technology. The first site Olivia had investigated had uncovered a third death, from the same horrific causes as the first two cases. Olivia really hoped Jimenez wasn’t answering his door because he wasn’t home. 

Their missing engineer did well enough to afford a one bedroom apartment, despite New York’s exorbitant rental costs. The living room was cluttered: newspapers, old mail, and printouts littered the floor so thickly Jimenez had pushed little paths through the chaos. A takeout container had been abandoned on a low table that faced a large TV set up for gaming, chopsticks leaning drunkenly on the inner edge of the cheap cardboard. She wasn’t surprised the kitchen showed few signs of use, beyond some odd stains on the oven and around the sink. She imagined Walter would have some idea what might have caused them, but Walter and Peter were at Massive Dynamic, quizzing Nina about the delta radiation bursts and also on the odd design specs they had found at the first three apartments, with a promise to catch up to her later in the day. She bagged several samples and took pictures for them to review if she caught up with them first. 

When presented with two closed doors, she mentally flipped a coin, and found the bathroom - and Joaquin Jimenez, in a similar state as the other three bodies. She sighed, and texted Peter and Astrid: whoever or whatever had killed the first three men and women had also ended Mr. Jimenez’s life. Suspects reset to _none_ and victims incremented to four – four too many, she thought, frustrated. And now she’d have to admit to Astrid that she had left Peter and Walter at Massive Dynamic. Astrid had sprained her ankle solving their last case, an injury that would keep her off field duty until it healed, leaving Fringe Division dangerously short-handed. 

WHERE IS YOUR BACKUP, Astrid texted back. 

Olivia sighed. MASSIVE DYNAMIC. CHECKING IN EVERY 15 MINUTES, she replied, and opened the door to the bedroom. 

Jimenez had shoved a twin bed into a corner, then lofted it, turning the bedroom into his best approximation of a garage workspace. The area under the bed had been turned into a sort of hobby shop, storage racks spilling out this or that project. One wall had been covered in corkboard and hung with tools. A workbench had been set up under the window, where the light was best. Various components covered the bench, wired and soldered and taped together. The largest project was stored in the bench’s kneehole, inert, but abandoned next to a device plugged into a too-short power cord, displacing a sturdy office chair. The various devices looked similar to the specs and the devices from the other sites under investigation. Could one of these, or a combination of them, be the source of their radiation bursts? 

Olivia pulled out Walter’s cobbled-together delta radiation detector. Walter hypothesized the devices would have low – well, lower – levels of radiation until connected to the correct power source. _And if it’s hooked up to the _incorrect_ power source?_ Peter had asked. _Let’s hope no one tries that,_ Walter had replied. 

She was sifting through the workbench’s works in progress, listening for changes in the detector’s soft clicks, when she heard the apartment's front door swung open.

"Excellent, Watson," a confident male voice said, the accent distinctly British.

"It's great if I have a future in lock-picking," a woman's voice said absently. "Did those scratches on the lock look fresh to you?"

Olivia silently eased toward the bedroom-turned-workroom's door, and caught a glimpse of the home invaders: a smallish Asian woman in heels that boosted her almost to her companion's eye level, both of them inconspicuous in street clothes.

"It seems our client was not the only person interested in Mr. Jimenez," the man said, moving away from his companion to scan the disordered living room's clutter, avoiding the rustling papers. 

Olivia stepped out of the bedroom, one hand poised to pull her gun, acutely aware of her badge clipped to her coat. "You're not," she said. "Olivia Dunham, FBI. Who are you, and why are you breaking into Joaquin Jimenez's apartment?"

Both had jumped when she stepped into the room, but quickly recovered. "My name is Sherlock Holmes, and this is Joan Watson," the man said. "We are consultants with the NYPD, who believe Mr. Jimenez may be connected to an open case."

"I want to see some identification," Olivia said, "and the name and phone number of your contact in the New York police."

"Captain Gregson of the 11th Precinct will vouch for us," Holmes said.

"I've got his card," Watson added, with the same confident poise in her voice as her body language. "It's in my purse - mind if I get it out?"

“Not at all.” Olivia shook her head, but didn't move her hand from her gun until Watson produced the business card.

"Peter," she said into her phone, not taking her eyes off Watson and Holmes, "Yes, I'm fine. Can you look up a Thomas Gregson, NYPD, in the law enforcement databases? I need you to call him and ask for descriptions and character references for a Sherlock Holmes and Joan Watson."

"Holmes?" Peter said, and Olivia could hear a keyboard pause in its clacking in the background. "British guy, kind of intense?"

"One of your weird connections?" Olivia asked, not really surprised.

"Something like that. You want the long version, or the short version?"

"Short would be good," she said.

"Pain in the ass genius," he said promptly. "Don't leave him alone with incriminating evidence or heroin. But that was in the other timeline, about five years ago." She heard the subtext in that statement: _things have changed_. Their experiences in the old timeline were an unreliable guide in this new world. "I've got Gregson's contact information, want me to call back?"

"How about you stay on the line," she said. "Can you set up a conference call?"

A quick conversation established Holmes and Joan's story. "Captain Gregson thinks very highly of you," Olivia said as she got off the phone. Holmes and Watson had used the time for their own ends, from their half-whispered half-texted conference on their own phones.

"What's the FBI's interest in Joaquin Jimenez, Agent Dunham?" Watson asked.

"We believe he may be connected to a series of incidents my division has been investigating," Olivia told them.

Holmes's eyebrows jumped in surprise. Watson asked, "A bunch of mysterious and truly gruesome deaths from massive blood loss, at the homes of members of the In Silicium hacker group?"

It was Olivia's turn to frown. "I'm not at liberty to discuss this investigation," she said, genuinely regretful. With Astrid limping between the lab and the Federal Building on crutches, Henrietta proving she had inherited the full measure of Bishop creativity and intractable Dunham stubbornness, and no less than four back-to-back crisis cases, she'd reflected more than once it would be nice to have extra hands.

Watson studied her coolly. "Three deaths," she said, "one in midtown, one in Williamsburg, one in Jackson Heights. All three autopsies showed exposure to delta radiation--"

"--how did you find that out?" Olivia interrupted. Fringe Division had used Massive Dynamic's delta detection network to uncover the subtly linked cases.

"--all of them members of the same hacking group, In Silicium," Watson continued. "Mr. Jimenez is one of the most active members of the group, under the nickname CarbonPhoenix, all one word." At Olivia's look, she said, "One of my professors worked with experimental cancer therapies, including a delta radiation clinical trial. She always included slides of the high dose side effects in her contemporary topics lecture."

Olivia pulled out her phone again. "Astrid? Astrid, Joaquin Jimenez _may_ have been involved with a group called In Silicium, under the name 'CarbonPhoenix'. Can you look into it?"

"May _have been_ ," Holmes echoed sharply. "Is Mr. Jimenez no longer with us, Agent Dunham?"

Olivia tried not to think of Joaquin Jimenez, slumped over the bathroom sink in a pool of black-red blood. But she must have given something away, because Holmes swerved around Olivia, heading for the bathroom.

"Sherlock--" Watson started to say, to his crime-focused backside.

"We have entertained the FBI long enough," her companion -- partner? Olivia wondered -- threw over his shoulder. 

"Mr. Holmes--" Olivia started to say, but Holmes already had the door open. She followed him, raising her voice over the crackle of papers rustling under her strides as she said firmly, "Mr. Holmes, this is an active crime scene--"

Something _clicked_ and shifted under her shoe. Everyone stopped... _dead in their tracks_ , Peter would say, Olivia thought, as a soft beeping began somewhere in the apartment.

There was a soft crackle of moving paper. "Don't move," Watson said, very calmly, as she knelt by Olivia's foot and pulled out her own phone. "There might be a pressure plate under your shoe."

Olivia swallowed, and held stock-still as Watson angled her phone's camera to get a picture of the device hidden under the room's paper litter. "It's a disguise," she said to Watson. "The papers on the ground, they’re hiding sensors or traps. There are probably more of them."

"Sherlock! Did you hear that?" Watson shouted.

Holmes scuffed the papers around his feet, then stooped to investigate something he had uncovered. "Is your device constructed from stiff cardboard and a green hexagonal circuit board, approximately five centimeters in diameter?"

"It's _under her shoe_. But there is a pointy green edge sticking out."

" 'Pointy'? Precision, Watson, precision." Holmes continued, "I am no expert, but it appears to be a one-time transmitter, with no attached explosive or incendiary. Agent Dunham is free to move."

"It's lousy security," Watson said to Olivia as she jumped to her feet. "Look at the papers - he's kicked a path for himself."

Olivia took a long step to an uncluttered patch of shabby, flattened carpeting. "As long as we stick to the cleared tracks, we can move around." She turned slowly, trying to pinpoint the source of the soft, insistent beeps as Holmes stuck his head into the bathroom and closet. She felt something cold settle in her stomach as she stopped at the threshold of the workroom, Watson right behind her.

"What's that noise?" Watson asked her. 

"I think it's a, an improvised explosive device," Olivia said, staring at a previously inert bundle of wires, microcontroller boards, and LEDs in the workbench's kneehole was now beeping and blinking.

Watson looked horrified. "It's a bomb?" Peripherally, Olivia noticed her grab Holmes’s arm as he tried to push past them.

Olivia recognized some of the components from the evidence collected at the previous crime scenes. "It's a delta bomb," she said quickly, pulling out her phone and stepping closer to study the device. "You two need to get out of here _right now_."

Only Holmes moved for the apartment’s door. "Watson, tools. I will activate the fire alarm and call emergency services." Watson threw a look over her shoulder in her companion's direction, but began rifling through the cluttered workbench, while Holmes called out, "how many floors must be evacuated?"

"The entire building." Olivia ran a hand through her hair, staring at the device as Peter picked up the phone. "They were building a bomb," she said, "or they were trying to build something else, and accidentally built a, a series of IEDs," she said, speaking faster and faster. "Peter, I activated it, we need to disarm it before it goes off. How long do we have before it detonates? Do you have the notes we found at the other crime scenes?"

"Better than that. I found their wiki, _with_ scans of the original designs they're working from," Peter said. "But it’s going to go off real soon. _Walter!_ Walter, I need your help," he shouted. "Just guess which manuscript about destruction by advancement of technology they scanned into their wiki and used to design their prototypes," he continued.

"Why am I not surprised?" Olivia said.

"Turn on the speaker phone and video feed and give me a look. Let's see if you can short-circuit something and run like hell."

Olivia ducked down to pan the phone over the tangle of wires and electronics. Not only had Watson not left, she could hear the other woman dumping Jimenez's half-complete projects on the rumpled bedcovers, clearing space on the workbench above her to lay out a series of objects, probably tools. Holmes's voice rose and fell on the phone, at an urgent clip, over the improvised bomb's mindless beeping, as the fire alarm in the hall added its piercing wails to the cacophony. But the chaos didn’t seem to affect the other woman’s steady focus or level-headed attitude as she retrieved the possibly useful from the almost certainly useless items scattered through the workroom.

"I don't think it’s going to be that simple," Olivia said to Peter, as she studied the device. "See that little sealed tin, with the red and black cords coming out of it?" The tin in question had held breath mints, before it had been soldered shut. 

"The one labeled 'amphilicite' in Sharpie? I see the problem." Peter paused. "Looks like there's a capacitor on the control board. Once it's built up to its maximum charge, it dumps everything it's got into the activation circuit. If you cut the wire connecting the capacitor to the activation circuit, it'll fizzle. But it’s also interfering with the camera phone. If the charge keeps building I'm not going to be able to see what you're looking at."

Holmes rejoined them as Peter spoke, kneeling next to Olivia. 

"What did I say about getting the hell out of here?" Olivia asked him tersely.

"Agent Dunham's got law _and_ common sense on her side," Peter chimed in, from the phone. "Clip the wrong wire, and the capacitor is going to dump a partial charge into the activation circuit. The effects should be more local, but just as nasty if you’re standing next to that thing."

Holmes studied Olivia as the beeping switched over to a quiet, high-pitched whine. "How many bombs _have_ you disarmed, Agent Dunham?" Holmes asked.

"One," Olivia said. She wished, fleetingly, that the Cortexiphan powers which had been quiescent since Bell's disappearance two and a half years ago would reappear, and let her turn off the lights that blinked furiously, casting odd little shadows across their faces in the wan indirect city daylight.

Holmes raised his eyebrows in surprise. "One more than most FBI agents. My focus has been in other areas, but after the American tragedy in 2001 I also worked with colleagues at Scotland Yard in the counterterrorism unit. This is an area with which I have some little experience."

"You're overstretched," Watson added. "You're here alone, without your partner. You've lost weight - your wedding ring is loose - and you have several signs of chronic sleep deprivation."

"Watson used to be a surgeon, she recognizes these things," Holmes said parenthetically, as Olivia tried to look at Watson in surprise. "She also has very steady hands."

"Hey," Watson said.

He continued, "The skills of a consulting detective are valuable in other, more lucrative trades. And yet, we are here, assisting the NYPD, because we believe - _I_ believe - the best use of our skills is to help others. _Let us help_."

Olivia hesitated, acutely aware of the capacitor's whine growing subtly, steadily louder. She was no musician, but she recognized the tone, a high-pitched C.... and more ominously, the overtone growing in step with the volume. In her line of work, the open fifth, the interval between C and G, over here and over there, was the only musical span that mattered.

"And face it, working homicide is _cool_ ," Peter added. "It's less boring than sitting behind a desk doing, say, forensic accounting." An example he hadn't picked at random, Olivia suspected.

She might be able to order Watson out of the room, but if Peter's assessment of Holmes in the previous timeline held true in this one, she would have more luck clocking him over the head and dragging him to an elevator than using her words. That, on top of their cool-headed actions so far, tipped the scales. "You do exactly what I say," Olivia said. "First we need to find the capacitor. Peter, what does it look like?"

"Give someone else the phone and have them point it so I can see the control board," Peter said. "Whoa," he added, as Watson swung the camera to face the dimly-lit kneehole. "The device is emitting too much radiation. I can't see a thing."

Olivia frowned. "Can you still talk me through it?"

"I'm going to have to, I guess,” he said, grimly. She didn't like it either.

"Is it big, small? A certain color?" Watson prompted Peter.

"Small, probably black," he said. "If you orient the board with the amphilicite connection on the bottom, it'll be in the upper right quadrant, at about 2 o'clock. According to their notes, they got most of the parts off the shelf from—“

"--Barduina," Olivia, Watson and Holmes finished with him. Watson nodded, a piece of the case apparently clicking into place in her mind. She pushed back a bit to let Holmes take her place, peering closely at the device.

"Okay, I think I see it," Olivia said. "There's... three wires attached to it, white, blue, and green."

"The blue wire is connected to the receiver, we already triggered that. You need to cut the ignition wire." Peter fell silent for a moment, then: "Damnit."

"Peter?"

The sigh was barely audible on the cell phone speaker. "They got in an edit war on the wiki. One faction wanted to use green wire, one reverted everything to white." Olivia could imagine the dark look on Peter's face at this amateurish work.

"If I may," Holmes said. He crab-walked closer to Olivia to scrutinize the device. "Watson. Green, or white?"

Watson tilted her head. "I'm sorry?"

"Is the green wire or the white wire attached to the activation circuit? Come on, Watson, a consulting detecting should be able to think on her feet."

"It's a _ticking bomb_. Do you really think this is the best time for an educational--"

 _Green_ , or _white_?"

Watson joined them on the floor and absently pushed a lock of hair out of her face as she studied the device. "White," she announced after a moment, "but you better not do this to me again."

Olivia looked at the consulting detectives. "White?" she asked.

"White," Holmes said firmly.

"Sorry 'Livia, unless you can find a way to fix the radiation problem, that's all I've got here."

Olivia looked over her shoulder at Watson. "Can you hand me the wirecutters?" she asked. Watson gave them to her without hesitation.

Olivia raised the wirecutters and hesitated for a long moment. _I love you,_ she wanted to say. _Kiss our incredible little girl good night for me, every night. Tell Walter it's going to be all right. I love you so much._ Instead, she delicately snipped the white wire.

"Are you going to do it?" Peter asked tensely.

"She already cut the wire," Holmes said, as the two-toned whine finally cut out and they all exhaled. "And we are in one piece. Or no more pieces than we began with," he corrected himself.

"I suppose I owe you a thank-you," Olivia said.

"It's not that different from a car alarm," he said briskly. "Wires, computer chips, all very easy to deduce from the previous devices and the information your husband provided." Holmes jumped to his feet. "If you will excuse me, a crime scene awaits."

Olivia watched Holmes leave the room as Watson stood, rearranging her clothes as if it helped her settle her mind after their near-miss. “How did he--” Olivia tried to find a polite way to end that sentence.

“When I met Sherlock, he said he deduced. And then he told me he used Google, because not everything is deducible.” Watson paused. “Some of the people Sherlock knows are fans of fringe science _and_ conspiracy theories. Your name came up a lot when we started cross-referencing weird FBI cases with the stuff we got from someone digging into Massive Dynamic’s history.” 

“You looked me up,” Olivia said, both impressed and unsettled as she recalled Holmes and Watson, smartphones firing away, as she had spoken with Captain Gregson… had it been less than an hour ago? She checked her watch. Less than fifteen minutes. The fire alarm Holmes had set off still rang through the apartment building’s halls. Somewhere outside, a bomb squad was standing down and packing up, if it had even made it to the apartment building. 

“We needed to verify your story,” Watson said, somewhere between apologetic and ironic, echoing Olivia’s earlier suspicion of the consultants. “Your father-in-law has some interesting fans.”

Olivia huffed out a small laugh. “Fans like In Silicium?” she asked. 

“I think so.” 

Olivia touched one temple, trying to rub away an incipient headache at the thought of people like Mr. Jimenez and his hacker friends experimenting with Walter and William Bell’s old designs for universe-breaching technology. Where had they even found them? Was the ZFT manuscript now running loose on the darknets? They had assumed they were dealing with devices intended solely for local terrorism, for Fringe’s values of local; the thought of innocents naïvely toying with devices that could rip a doorway to the other side gave her chills. "That could cause a lot of problems for my division.” Broyles would not be thrilled with this new development. “How did you… deduce... which wire was connected to the activation circuit?" Olivia asked, pulling her attention back to Watson. 

"There was a case with a bomb, when I first met Sherlock," Watson said casually. "I did some reading, and talked to some of Sherlock's contacts about IEDs when we started investigating the In Silicium deaths. Any competent bomb-maker would use some kind of mnemonic, or a system for multiple devices. The bombs from the other crime scenes had green and blue wires, and a lot of melted copper that must've been the activating wire.” She looked away, toward the faint sounds of someone moving in the bathroom. “I better catch up with Sherlock."

"She's good," Peter said. "Can we keep her?"

Olivia smiled. "I think they come as a set."

"Walter needs a friend." He paused. "Actually, we should probably keep Walter and Sherlock Holmes as far away from each other as possible, for as long as possible."

"Especially after we ask them to hand over their case notes," Olivia said, as she stood, snagging her phone and switching the speakerphone off.

"Do you really have to do that? Hon, I know the devices are based on William Bell's work, but it looks like this is a home-grown operation. It's weird, but it's not directly connected to the Observers or the other side. It wouldn't be the first time Fringe has used consultants."

Olivia considered that. “Broyles isn’t going to like spending the money,” she said, trying to keep the conversation light. In six years, Broyles had given them grief about the Fringe Division budget exactly once, when Peter tried to wheedle a C-130 out of the FBI. Broyles had suggested chartering a plane on the occasions - the _rare_ occasions, Mr. Bishop - they needed wings. 

“I think I can make the case for the increased expenditure,” Peter said, matching her tone. She suspected a longer and more emotional conversation would be on his agenda when he arrived. _I don’t want to lose you again, Olivia Dunham,_ he had told her, not very long ago, and yet today they were half a city apart while he listened to her disarm a bomb. “See you there? I think I can get Walter moving, be at the crime scene soon.” 

“Sure,” she said, imagining Peter ruthlessly chivvying Walter out of Massive Dynamic as she ended the call. She took a deep breath, composing herself, before going in search of the consulting detectives.

She followed their voices to the bathroom, stopping outside to watch Holmes and Watson at work. Holmes, awkwardly balanced on the edge of a stained bathtub, used his phone as a magnifying glass, while Watson circled the body, looking but not touching it with her gloved hands. 

“--same pattern,” Watson was saying to Holmes. “Bruising especially prominent on the hands and fingers, mottled pigment in the eyes--” 

“And the hemorrhaging,” Holmes added, stepping around a puddle of blood. 

Watson sighed. “Yeah. All of this is consistent with platelet deficiency, though usually people don’t deteriorate so quickly. Or so badly,” she said, looking at the blood. “He’s been dead for hours, and it doesn’t look like the blood has clotted at all.” 

“Not like the movies,” Holmes said absently, moving to the medicine cabinet. 

“No, if this were a two-hour drama we would know by now who did this.” Watson paused. “Okay, that guy _was_ an idiot. But you don’t have to keep bringing it up.” 

“Fascinating, though, how consistently _wrong_ he was.” 

“Eccentric genius and his _assistant_ is a cliché. It’s probably in all those movies he watches.” Watson put an irritated twist on _assistant_ , as if this was not the only example of such behavior. 

Even if _Holmes_ had a reputation for eccentricity, Olivia wondered how anyone could mistake Joan Watson’s confidence and self-possession for that of an assistant, as she watched Joan carefully lie on the floor, inches from the late Mr. Jimenez, to study a splash of chemical stain with an avid curiosity equal to her partner’s. 

If Gregson’s character reference was correct, that curiosity was well-matched with the investigative skills Fringe Division badly needed on this case. "Mr. Holmes, Ms. Watson," Olivia said, drawing their attention. "I'm afraid the FBI will have to take over this investigation. However, based on your close relationship with the NYPD, I was wondering... would you like a job?"


End file.
